Nikolai Lubkiewicz, on 29 July 2014 - 10:53 AM, said:
Greetings MechWarriors!
Please let us know which of Paul's ideas to balance PPC+Gauss you would prefer to see in-game!
None.
Get that fool away from the game design. Pay him whatever he wants - just so long as he shuts up and stays at the ski resort.
First - let's analyze the problem.
The problem is that both the PPC and Gauss Rifle are precision long range weapons that deal up-front direct-fire damage.
Unlike the lasers, the PPC deals all of its damage in one big wallop.
I know you all recognize this, because you altered the mechanics of the Clan ERPPC to give 'arcing' damage - or whatever - because the person in charge of making that call was stupid and didn't think about these design considerations back during the beta phase of the game when any sensible MechWarrior would have realized the balance problems that have been had with the real-time adaptations of battletech mechanics.
The problem is that both of these weapons compete directly with the present role of the autocannon in terms of being able to deliver large amounts of damage to a target - and they can both do it at ranges in excess of most autocannons.
Before we even begin to consider arbitrary limits on how many weapons of what are firing (which is the absolute -last- resort to balancing issues, and it basically means that you designed a completely broken system; any developer that resorts to such techniques is horrible and should feel horrible) - let's consider ways in which we can do the following:
Alter damage mechanics.
Alter firing mechanics.
Alter aiming mechanics.
Alter heat/'cost' mechanics.
The weapon system that makes the most sense to focus on is the weapon system that comes with the fewest consequences for equipping and using it. Since the Gauss Rifle more than doubles the mass of the PPC and consumes an enormous amount of chassis real-estate - it should be a weapon that is tampered with relatively little, and mostly in comparison to weapons like the AC10 and AC20 - since those weapons have similar mechanics and choosing them should not be a 'compromise' over the Gauss (as a Large Laser should not be a compromise over a PPC - each should have their own 'role' or set of mechanics that make them unique choices for the player).
This means that the whole "Gauss rifle charge" mechanic needs to go. Not only is Paul (or whoever's) explanation an insult to the trade of electrical engineering - it is also not at all conducive to the 'end goal.' By desynching the firing mechanic of the gauss rifle - it makes it relatively pointless to install as a single unit, since its firing mechanics are so different from the other weapons that -can- be carried as part of the arsenal for the same effective range.
Basically - what it does is make the gauss rifle a primary weapon system. You won't see many people run it on a battlemaster because it is just too awkward to run as a single unit (just slap on a couple PPCs in the plentiful energy hardpoints and get the same thing but better) - but you'll still see Cataphracts, Jaegers, and some Clan mechs run 2 of them - because as a pair they do enough damage to make it worth building a mech based around the firing mechanic.
You'll see mediums run them - but that is because it is, once again, their primary weapon system and the player expects to operate their mech around the behavior of the weapon.
This means it does little to address the problem - it just means that people who were once running mechs with a PPC or two blasting alongside their Gauss have switched to all-gauss or all-PPC loadouts, spare for a few.
Which is precisely what we predicted when you all proposed that idea.
Then you geniuses came out with the Direwolf after developing some convoluted 'omnipod' system to try and keep Clan mechs from being too 'crazy.'
More on that, later.
So, our focus should be on altering how the PPC functions.
We have to look at two main categories to try and balance the PPC on the battlefield. First is lasers. Since the PPC is an energy weapon - (and is considered the 'ultimate' energy weapon) - we need to make sure it does something preferable compared to the existing role of lasers. Since lasers are a 'damage over time' weapon - this would imply that the PPC circumvents part of that, allowing more damage to be done reliably to a single component.
We cant' balance this around heat, alone, though - since insta-damage is very good at allowing one to deal said damage before retreating to cool down and avoid the incoming damage.
There are a few possible solutions - but there are two immediate ones that come to mind. First is to stick with the trend of making energy weapons have a mild 'over time' component to them. Second is to give the PPC - an energy weapon - a charge-up duration.
You see... something in the lore hints at this... it's called a PPC Capacitor - you add it on to a PPC and you allow it to increase its damage by 5, so long as the player chooses to charge the PPC (heat is also increased by 5). This is a truly marvelous revelation - as it means that we have already considered a mechanic that can play a role in future lore equipment. (Can anyone tell me how streak LRMs are going to work?... or ATMs?... 'when we get there' is a bad time to realize that you have no real mechanic by which to make their lore and their implementation sensible. I've solved that one, too, by the way).
So - we can actually do something relatively interesting, here. If we make it so that a PPC must charge and that its damage (and heat) is based upon the amount of its charge... then we have a weapon that no longer interferes with the role of the autocannon as the "twitch" weapon class being able to react to sudden threats that peek around the corner.
Now we can have even more fun when we look at how heat can be applied. It can be reasonably assumed that heat is generated during the charging process and that a spike of heat will be delivered during the firing process. A nice place to start would be 5 heat delivered during charging, 5 heat delivered when fully charged and firing.
The astute game developer has probably realized, by now, that the charging process occurs over time, and therefor the heat to be delivered during charging will be divided across the amount of time necessary to fully charge... which means our charging action is heating over time...
So, you hold down the button to charge... and what happens when you're done charging...? How about you just get to keep your weapon charged... for the same amount of heat generated per second. Want to charge up that 6PPC stalker? Go ahead. Have fun with that when each PPC is delivering 2.5 heat per second when you begin charging and zaps you with 30 heat when you fire.
There's really no need for heat scaling, here, either. Especially if you'd consider a more sensible heat system such as the one I've proposed in the past that allows for real-time penalties to be accrued without being subject to quirky behavior from heat spikes.
Here is the other thing we should do, now. PPCs are high energy particle cannons blasting particles at nearly the speed of light. As such - we can treat them as hit-scan weapons that have a shorter-than-pulse-laser duration (0.3 seconds, or something).
This completely decouples them from Gauss Rifles without a system that feels unduly 'rigged' to the player. The PPC has a natural 'feel' to its role that makes it fit in line with other energy weapons without it being yet another autocannon. The Gauss Rifle retains much of its original role and people can use it in applications where the whole mech doesn't have to be consumed with the quirks of one weapon system.
"But the PPC now becomes awkward to use"
Not with lasers - which are also hit-scan weapons. Rather than trying to make the player compensate for a charge mechanic -and- a differing ballistic mechanic; they only have to compensate for the charge mechanic.
About the only weapon conflict that arises is between the large pulse laser and the PPC - though the charge time of a PPC keeps the role of the pulse laser largely preserved (though I would argue for increasing its range or further decreasing its recycle time).
But that still leaves us with the problem of the 4 Gauss Direwolf.
Bluntly, PGI, you're ********. That pretty much sums up the reason that problem exists. Not only was it about the most predictable thing to come from the omnipod system, it is part of a product of competitive gameplay environments.
The reason why you would rarely see such builds in practical tabletop games was because the game had mission objectives that spanned outside of simply blowing up battlemechs. There were costs associated with operating those battlemechs, and missions that lasted various lengths of time between resupply where targets included everything from infantry squads to drop ships across hundreds of square kilometers.
A 4-Gauss Direwolf that has to walk 3 kilometers to a front line only to be confronted with a column of hovercraft will be nearly useless by time it wastes ammunition on vehicles that won't allow it to ignore them.
The same goes for the AC40 jaeger.
Basically - there are some balance problems that are a product not of the customization system, but of the fact that the only thing for players to customize for is Team Solaris.
Without other objectives to consider when designing their mechs - there is little variation in what makes an 'effective' mech. What makes an 'effective' mech is one that can deal the most damage in the shortest amount of time while surviving the most amount of incidental fire.
Speed, maneuverability, and size are simply components of that equation as opposed to valid metrics that are key to other roles/objectives outside of destroying battlemechs.
That is where the real balance problem rests with this game. It is the fact that the only thing for a player to do is to enter into a death-match with a team of other players of known quantity.
Start by creating a game, and then maybe you could go about balancing it.
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